Surface Pro 3 throttling

Another update after a few workdays with my i7 SP3.

I am now 99% sure that the thermal throttling has nothing to do with the hardware or the airflow and is all in the drivers with the graphics chip. Today I compressed a 30GB virtual machine using 7zip and using all 4 logical cores. It took over an hour with the processor pegged between 93 and 100% load. Throughout the whole hour, not once did the surface drop below 2.1GHz, mostly sitting around 2.2GHz at 80 degrees Celsius. The surface pro 3 is perfectly capable of maintaining high speeds and acceptable temperatures for long periods of time, I have only observed throttling when something graphical (aka a video game) is also in play, using the Intel graphics 5000 as well. I will try to run some sort of graphical stress test to confirm this, but from a compression stress test, purely processor, the surface performs perfectly.

Well, to let you know, I just now got my i3 model and am having zero problems out of it.  I am still in the setup phase and will be installing software on it very soon.  I have the Microsoft Wedge Keyboard and Wedge mouse that I am using on it and will be getting the type cover later.

I even dropped the tablet 2.5 feet by accident when opening the box but no damage.  Pen works great as well.

Been looking for details on the August Update and the only thing mentioned is that it will be an "optional" update.  Unknown if any Intel video drivers will be in it but there will be other updates that will come along with it.

You may have hit the nail on the head being the video.  The Haswell series has had problems and issues compared to other Intel processors.  Have to wait for August the 12th to find out for sure.

Well, not necessarily the graphics drivers themselves. People with the i5 SP3 are the ones who first noticed this problem, and that specific model uses the same graphics (and supposedly driver) as the SP2 with the same processor which had no problems. I'm more pointing the finger at the UEFI pre boot environment/firmware at this point. Great to hear that you had a good initial experience with your i3 SP3, maybe try to load a 3D based game on and see how it fares?

I would like to add my experiences to this since I am using, and have used, the SP3 and SP2 i5 8GB versions, both with a 4300U. I run CPU heavy, graphics light processes on my SP. I can confirm that I get sustained CPU speeds of +2.2GHz indefinitely when using all 4 logical processes at 100%. However, as soon as a graphics intensive task kicks in my CPU performance drops. I was getting identical performance between computers.

This is actually easy to understand from a thermal point of view. The TDP is 15W for both the graphics and CPU resources. As has been pointed out in the past any heat generated by graphics reduces the amount of heat that can be generated by the CPU, this is especially true of ultrabook class computers with limited thermal overhead and integrated graphics.

Oddly, I dropped mine SP3 when opening it too. I don't know exactly what it was about the box that made me think it was right side up.

Loading software will be next.  Right now, letting it perform a full charge plus I checked the Internet speed of the adapter (I have a B/G/N router) and the numbers match my regular computer's connection speed for uploads/downloads.  I think 802.11 ac is where most people are having a problem in that arena.  Doesn't bother me, though.

I will probably wait until tomorrow to install AOE III and give the graphics a run down.  Right now, my tablet has been running some time and only warm in the upper right section which is where the CPU is.  That is normal and not hot to the touch.  Battery packs are staying relatively cool and I ran it on battery for about an hour setting up Office and a few other programs.  Nothing graphical.

I think that this tablet just might be my new "desktop" and replace my other machines.  I am on it now.

If there is a major update coming across, a firmware to the UEFI usually happens for the Pro models which had fixed a lot of issues in the past.  If Intel had released that stack of updates as promised, that should be it.

For the games test tomorrow, I will load up one game I have that is somewhat current and 3D.  Usually don't play games that much but I use a few to test equipment.